Digital marketers often find themselves utilizing all sorts of marketing techniques available to them in order to increase clicks, visits, and conversions. However, the more they try new channels, the more convoluted the performance reports become. At times, it becomes hard to clearly understand the complex customer journey or path to purchase and accurately point out which engagement tactics, messages, or touch-points drove maximum conversions. It is also important to study that out of those conversions, which channels resulted in the most high-value customers.

According to a Forrester report, “Even with a high level of interest in attribution analysis, only 30% of marketers use advanced statistics-based approaches for measuring the impact of their marketing and media efforts.” The report points that the major challenges faced by marketers when it comes to attribution analytics are: deficient internal resources, difficulty in accessing connecting disparate data, limited funding, and a lack of knowledge and support.

Attribution analytics helps in understanding the needs of the customers and in identifying what vehicles best engage them. Here are some of the immediate benefits that digital marketers can get out of channel attribution analytics:

Deep understanding of customer’s purchase journey

Today customers are constantly moving from one channel to the other and weave a complex net of interactions with your brand massages. While they are going about their lives, they pass through myriad devices, use various websites, traverse social media, use mobile apps, respond to online communications, browse through information, come across in-store marketing, and so on – making their journey much more complex than what most companies are capable of understanding. With attribution analytics, it becomes easier to understand the value brought in by various mobile, online and offline touch-points that a customer traverses through. This knowledge helps marketers in designing much more targeted and relevant communication strategies. Channel attribution analysis can help in clearly identifying how a customer traverses through multiple channels and mediums and how you can have a better impact at each touch-point for increased engagement and customer wins.

Get a holistic view of marketing data

Marketing data keeps pouring in from all the channels and often it becomes so complex that marketers find it impossible to identify new opportunities or predict future outcomes. Channel attribution collates and integrates data from all the channels so that businesses can identify what motivates their customers, how do they behave, what are their needs and expectations – at different touch-points and devices. Another key factor to study is that how one channel has an impact on the other. Cross-channel attribution is the key to understand these finer insights about your marketing strategies and understanding customers at a much deeper level. It also arms marketers with the data and numbers they need to forecast future events and helps them take informed marketing decisions.

Intelligent marketing decisions

According to the Forrester Study, 67% of companies indicated that attribution helps them with future marketing and media decisions. The immediate benefit gained through channels attribution is that marketers can understand the performance of each campaign and their roles in customer journeys while they are happing. This enables them to change the future course of action and take decisions that result in better conversions and engagements. Smart, timely and targeted marketing decisions impact the company bottom-line significantly.

Optimized marketing spends

The most important benefit of channel attribution is that marketers can allocate budgets based on channels performance. More marketing dollars can be spent on channels that give greater number of high-value customers. For instance, one channel might be bringing in many visitors, but they are only buying hugely discounted sale products once; while another channel is bringing in few visitors but most of them are converting into loyal long term customers. Marketers can decide which channels are most beneficial for the amount spent. Advanced attribution modeling can give real numbers and costs associated with each touch-point. Some key factors like cost per acquisition, cost to serve, customer value, higher quality leads, etc., can be studied with channel attribution analysis. These insights can help marketers in distributing marketing budgets across channels for better outcomes.

Improved customer experience

So far we talked about the benefits of channel attribution from the marketer’s point of view. But the most immediate advantage that is a by-product of effective attribution is improved customer experience. When a marketer understands customer behavior, expectations, and needs, then the marketing strategies automatically become more aligned, relevant, targeted, and engaging. This results in better customer engagement, customer delight, brand loyalty, and brand advocacy. There is an overall improvement in product performance and marketing effectiveness.

To conclude

Channel attribution analytics gives a clear picture of how the current media investments are performing and hence future marketing investments can be made on channels that generate more of high-value customers in the most cost-effective way. In the age where “customer is truly the king”, the companies that pay attention to these finer details and go a step further to understand their customers will definitely win the race.

This is a great piece of information for digital marketers on channel attribution analytics. It shows how current media investment trends are working. Thus, one can easily formulate marketing investment strategy. Thanks for providing us with such a useful information regarding the analytics.http://www.digital-marketing-courses.itm.edu/